INDUSTRY TRENDS & INSIGHTS:

Q: What are some of the most significant changes you’ve seen in the petrochemical shutdown and turnaround industry over the past five years?

A: I would say in the last five years it would definitely be the impacts of COVID – and of course there was a huge amount of impacts associated with that. To me, one of the best things that came out of it was the care and – I would say – custody of our contractors, making sure that we had good, safe working environments and the amount of diligence that it drove around understanding planning to that level. When we were trying to calculate out the number of people in with social distancing and all that, it drove a tremendous amount of innovation in industry to understand better how we do apply density modeling and the cost and schedule impacts.

Q: In your experience, what has been the impact of digital transformation (e.g., predictive maintenance, IoT, AI) on shutdown and turnaround operations?

A: We just started the digital journey about a year or so ago, so there's a lot of – still – learning around this. From what I've seen of it, there's a tremendous amount of potential. It's understanding that potential, and how you apply it to give yourself the best advantage. There's a tremendous amount of capability, but it's understanding how to take that capability and make it work for what we try to accomplish. I've seen a lot in the digital space around accessibility, remote work capability, the digital twin scenarios. There's a lot of  capability out there and I don't think industry as a whole keeps up with everything very well. So it's finding that technology that works for your organization, and then asking how you apply it and what advantage you get out of it.

Q: With increasing environmental regulations, how have shutdown and turnaround strategies had to adapt to meet sustainability and environmental compliance?

A: This is a continuous evolution, it's been going on for a very long time. It's understanding your decommissioning and your commissioning plans – that’s what I've seen primarily around this. There are environmental regulations we have to comply with as part of execution but most of the time, we're pretty aware of those. Commissioning and decommissioning activities – as a general rule in industry – are not well thought-out. It's going to take three days to shut the unit out and then you get five days to start the unit back up – or whatever it is – and then you have new compliance-type issues that come off from environmental compliance that now change how you have to decommission the unit or how you have to commission the unit, so it's understanding what we consider the operational timeline better than what we've done historically. For us, we plan and schedule the operational activities so that we understand that this is the amount of time that something that we used to flare out in 24 hours, 20 years ago, now takes four days because we're restricted on the amount of flare emissions that we can push. So, it's understanding those impacts, and they're not always well understood or communicated.

BEST PRACTICES & STRATEGIES:

Q: What are the key lessons you’ve learned in optimizing turnaround planning to minimize downtime and cost while maintaining safety and quality?

A: I would say around that it's: plan for everything. That's one of the biggest pitfalls I see within industry is that a lot of organizations rationalize for synergy – your indirects, your support, a lot of stuff like that. For us, we plan every single activity so that we are running truly resource-loaded schedules and we know what our required capability needs to be to execute the plan. So, that's one of the biggest gaps, I think, in industry – we have a lot of people that do very generic planning, so when it comes time and you're looking at, for instance, your inspection workforce and you did not detail-plan what inspection activities have to occur and what the durations of those activities are, you don't have a good view, you're basing it on someone's opinion that may or may not have purview to the entire execution. For me, it has always been planning what we are going to execute. And then the second half of that for me has always been developing my risk registers, understanding what my risks are and building plans for the key risks – what I would consider my priority one risk or I would say medium to high probability, high impact – and having a plan before I ever step into it. So, if I have this discovery, I already have a plan. I may have to tweak the plan a little to accommodate exactly what I’ve found, but I have the basis of the plan so that when it comes time, I'm able to execute on that plan.

 

Q: Can you discuss the role of effective communication between internal teams and contractors during a turnaround, and how it contributes to project success?

A: This, to me, is always one of the biggest keys to success – communication within the organization is always critical to me. And the number of turnarounds that I do reviews on, mentoring with other turnaround managers, things like that, and I talk to them, and it's like, "Well, we closed this vessel up, but we had a repair", but nobody communicated with the contractor. So, it came back up on schedule, the contractor closed the vessel, pulled all the blinds, and then we had to go back and redo everything. Sadly, it happens a lot more than people think. So, it's understanding what that communication is – for us, I set up email and text distribution that includes all turnaround resources. Even my safety contractors – if we have a discovery item that comes up, or a change request that comes up during a turnaround, everyone is notified the second that change request is generated to know that there is something that is being reviewed or discussed, associated to this piece of equipment or this job scope, so that they're aware of what's going on. The change order comes in and it takes 12 hours, 24 hours – whatever it is – to get processed and get through the system and get back out to the contractor. Well, in 24 hours in a turnaround, a lot of things have changed. And so, it's making sure that the communication occurs upfront on those types of items – and there's a huge amount of stuff that goes into communication, I can talk for hours on understanding how that communication needs to occur and the benefits of it. To me, when we execute a turnaround, it is one organization. The color of your coveralls and what company you work for means absolutely nothing to anyone. You're all part of the team, and – I won't say 100% of the time, but 99.9% of the time – turnaround communications go to the entire team. There's very little that stays internally to the company side or to the contract side. So, that one piece is probably one of the biggest failure mechanisms that I see within turnarounds.

Q: What are the common pitfalls that companies face during shutdowns, and how can organizations avoid these mistakes?

A: There are quite a few. We’ve talked about the planning aspect, so understanding your planning and having plans developed – the communication side is certainly very important. One of the biggest pitfalls that I see within – from the company side – is contractor selection. And so, it's making sure that you have the right competent resources and people that it's not necessarily – to me – company-dependent. It is about the resource that shows up, the person that shows up on your site to execute that scope of work, making sure that you have the right people in the right places. One of the topics I talk on all the time is that everybody wants the A-level, top tier of the contractor. Well, the reality is, yes, there are some of those that you do need, but you don't need the top tier on every contractor. It's nice to have, don't get me wrong, but some of your supports and some of your other contractors that are not critical path or competing critical paths, you can detail with a B team. So, it's understanding what your scope of work is, how you best execute that and how you find the capability in industry to come and execute your critical scope items and your critical paths. So, that's one I see. Unfortunately, it's driven a lot by cost, and turnaround managers are saddled with procurement and purchasing, making decisions on contractor selection based on pricing instead of capability, so that's one of the big pitfalls. And of course, there's always capital project integration – that's just always a topic – and it's one of the things most people don't know. I sit on a lot of industry panels and industry benchmarking and do a lot of things across refining, chemical, agriculture – across a lot of organizations. Currently in the United States, more than 80% of the turnarounds executed fail to meet their intended objectives. And for a $16 billion a year industry, that's not a good success rate. That's benchmarked on plus or minus 10 %, which are our usual authorization levels. If you go back to the old methodology of a penny over or a penny under, a minute over a minute under, it gets up in the 95-98% range that don't make it. It is a very complex endeavour to do a turnaround.

CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS:

Q: What have been some of the most challenging shutdowns or turnarounds you’ve worked on, and how did you overcome the hurdles you faced?

A: That's one of the things I'm known for – just crazy, challenged turnarounds. There have been several in my career that stick out in my mind, and there are various things that cause those. One of the ones we had – it was quite a few years back now, about 10 years ago – we were doing a set of reactor catalyst changes and associated turnaround. It was the largest turnaround that this particular unit had ever taken on. We got into the reactors and the catalyst was fused, 100%. And conventional methodologies – what we knew and what was I would say common knowledge – didn't work. It was a tremendous amount of trial and error – understandably, of course, the entire time you're trialling and erroring, you're losing product. All your units are down for beyond what you think and what you planned. Of course, we're sitting there looking at progress, and we're trying to extrapolate. Okay, we know we have this problem – it's never been encountered anywhere in the world before. With most chemical plants, there's another one like it somewhere. We network with a lot internally, and nobody had ever seen this, nobody had ever dealt with it, there was no expert to call on. And so, a lot of that was about keeping the team focused on the other activities. “Yes, we have this horrible show over here, we know about this. You don't need to worry about that, we have people working on this. Stay focused on your scope of work, what you're executing, and we'll finish the rest of the turnaround. We'll deal with this problem as it comes.” And so, for that one, it was a very challenging effort. And we eventually did figure it out, but when we ran the initial scenarios based on, I think, four days of progress, it was telling us we weren't going to finish the turnaround for about seven months. And of course, that's not an acceptable outcome to anybody, so then you're back to the drawing board. Okay, how do I figure this out? And so, it's the adaptability and flexibility. I'm not sure who actually coined the statement, but I know MacArthur was the one that said it: "The best laid plans are great until the first shot". And so, we opened this up and it was just: “Oh my gosh, what are we going to do?” And then you continue, you involve your subject matter experts, keep your organization focused on where you need them focused and then work through the problems. That was a horrible job.

Q: With the ongoing global supply chain challenges, how do you ensure timely delivery of critical materials and equipment during a turnaround?

A: This one shifts around way too often. Especially with the COVID impacts and then the issues with metallurgies and different material availability and all that, it has expanded what we look at for critical and long lead equipment. Within our work processes, we have milestones set to say, "Okay, we've evaluated all scope, we've identified critical or long lead material". And so, generally, you're looking at exotic metallurgy, big equipment, things like that, that you're going to have to reach out and go get. Well, you get surprised now by things that were commonly available and are now not. So now it's becoming more and more the case that, okay, you don't have your detailed plans developed yet. You don't have your bill of materials fully vetted and concise with your scope, but you're basically reaching out and confirming with vendors, "Hey, I'm going to need 200 stainless steel valves”, whether they be duplex or vanilla grade stainless, or whatever it is. And then, "All right, what's the availability of these things?" And then it switches around. So, two years ago, getting duplex materials was almost impossible to get. For a single isolation valve, for a replacement, you were getting a year lead time on a common valve. A year later, I'm still basically working off of that assessment – this is going to be difficult to get. A year or two years later, I reach out for the same valve way in advance, and they're like, "Yeah, it's on the shelf, we have it here. It's in Houston. We'll have it to you tomorrow." And I'm like, "What?" It's a very dynamic market. So, it's taking a detailed look at your scope list and understanding – I would say, at a high level, before your planning is even really up and running well – what your anticipated material delivery needs are. And then reaching out with your vendors and trying to figure out, okay, what is going to be the one this time? For one job we have scheduled, valves that were readily available and PSVs and different things – pipe that was normally not an issue – became an issue. I've got some of the materials coming in two days before the turnaround starts. It’s not ideal by any scenario, but it was one of those where it got past us. We never thought that this material would be difficult to obtain, and it turned out it was.

Q: How do you handle unexpected disruptions, such as safety incidents or equipment failures, during a shutdown, and what processes do you have in place to quickly adapt?

A: I think a lot of this one goes around the safety incidents, and so, unfortunately you have the potential. Somebody used to say, “We're not making cotton candy, we're not making milk”. We deal in a very hazardous environment and for turnarounds, we're dealing with things that only get touched in so many years. And so, the tribal knowledge of how to address that – or the detail of how to address it – gets lost over time. I talk to people all the time about this – turnaround is one of the highest safety risk standpoints, because you have people that are unfamiliar with your processes and your procedures coming in to do the most difficult and dangerous work that you generally will perform. And luckily – knock on wood – I've been very fortunate not to have very many safety incidents. But when they do occur, to me, it is taking the time with the organization down to the very bottom level of the organization to understand what happened, why it happened and how we prevent it from happening again. And we've had productivity models associated with this. When you have a significant safety event, generally higher than just a first aid, you will lose about 30% productivity for the next 2-3 shifts. So, it is a significant impact and a lot of people try to – I won't say, bury it – but try to just keep going, and you need to take the time in today's environment to address what happened. So, if a guy tripped over a rock in the parking lot, okay, we have to talk about foot placement and how walking is working and your position awareness and all. You take the time with those guys to put those thoughts back out to them, so that it's fresh in their mind. God forbid that you have a fatality or serious injuries, things like that, but it does happen unfortunately. And so, it's taking the time to find out – because there'll be 1,000 rumors running around about what happened. It's taking the time to address not only what occurred, but how we are going to prevent it from occurring again. And I place a huge amount of importance – and everybody in industry does – on personnel safety. And the disruptions that it causes are and can be devastating. I've seen the entire turnarounds shut down for a week to walk through a safety incident or an investigation or something like that, so it's a significant business impact. And so, for me, first it's preventing those from ever occurring – it's of course, everyone's goal – but when small incidents occur, it's addressing those small incidents before they become large incidents.

INDUSTRY COLLABORATION & COMMUNITY:

Q: How important is collaboration across the supply chain, including with vendors, contractors, and other external parties, to ensure a successful turnaround?

A: I think this is probably one of the big points that helps drive our success, that I develop relationships with our contractors, with our providers and suppliers. Because unfortunately, especially within the chemical business, things change very quickly. What was may not be what will be next week. So, it's understanding building that collaboration and relationship with them, and then also, our five-year plans for turnarounds and things like that. I share those plans with all of my providers so that they know, "Hey, this is the suite of work that we have coming now, yes, Heith has it scheduled for April, it may end up being May". But they know that there is this unit turnaround coming up next year or two years from now, things like that. So, they're aware of our plans and what we intend to do. To me, that has always been hugely beneficial. And one of the things that I utilize quite often, for I would say my primary vendors – my large contractors, I issue POs a year in advance. So, for 2026 turnarounds, the POs for those turnarounds are being issued this month. And so, vendors are not thinking, "Hey, I’ve got to go win the Celanese turn around, I’ve got to make sure my bids are good". You still have to do all that. But my main goal is: “You're going to do this job, you're on the schedule to perform this work, now let's discuss what crews were sending, capabilities, all that”. We don't have the details at this point, but we know the basics. So, it's making sure that my vendors are aware. And for people that have never been in what I will call a contractor war room, there's a big board on the wall and it has a list of jobs that they have been awarded, they have POs in place and it has a list of jobs that you're chasing. For me, success is tied to being on that side where they know they're going to perform the work, they have already slotted and assigned their crews and supervision, everything else to that work, rather than coming in last minute, a month or 60 days before the turnaround and then awarding the jobs. Those guys have contractors right now. I talked to four of my mechanical general contractors in the last week – they're all completely booked for the first half of 2025, they're having to turn down work, they do not have the physical capability of people to go and perform the work that people are asking them to do. So, it’s not being in that position, because when you get in that position is when you get to the C and D teams because they've cobbled together whatever they can get and who is available.

Q: What are some of the best practices for managing diverse teams during turnarounds, particularly when dealing with contractors from different regions or backgrounds?

A: I think for that, one is primarily clarity of scope, understanding what you're asking them to perform, what they're going to perform. And I'm very big – especially when I'm reaching out to different regions or backgrounds, things like that – on bringing those guys on early, reviewing their scope of work with them, and making sure of my execution plan and my strategy. I would love to think I'm the smartest person in the room – I rarely am – so it’s bringing them on board and letting the experts tell me. “I chose you for a reason, because of your technical capability to perform the scope of work. Now let's walk through my assumption and then your experience, and let's make sure that we're aligned on what we're going to try to accomplish and how we're going to accomplish this.” So, to me, it is selection early and then making sure that you're aligned, and they're aligned with the expectations and the outcomes for that scope award. And I'll tell you one of the biggest ones – in a previous organization, I had to use a lot of contractors from Europe, from Italy, from Germany, France, places like that. Have a translator that can speak to industry terms. We had to do a project in Canada, and I had a large contingent of Italian contractors because this was their design equipment, they were my OEM. It was my fault, I did not bring in an industry person that could speak Italian fluently, so I had to reach out and get an Italian interpreter who did not know what an exchanger was. And so, when he was trying to communicate with them, it was a very big gap. Luckily, I was able to reach to this contractor, because this went on for a couple of days and we kept having miscommunication, and the guys would go do something because this is what the interpreter tells them, and it's not what I was telling them to do. And I reached back to the contractor and said, "Hey, you have someone that can please get over here to do correct interpretation?" Because I would see it, because I didn't understand what he was on about, I don't speak Italian, and I would see the look on the guys' faces and you could see the look of confusion, like, "That doesn't make sense". But it was like, "Okay, the boss said this is what he wants to do, so this is what we're going to go do". So, it was a very challenging environment. Luckily, I was able to correct it. It's understanding that risk and it was something I had dealt with in small cases before that – a few instances just here and there. I had a large contingent, about 300 people from Italy on that job. And I would say probably 99% of them did not speak English very well. And it's the same thing with leadership – we're a very diverse organization. We have leaders, in China, in Germany, in Europe, Netherlands, South America and North America, and there can definitely be language barriers when you're having conversations with them. And so, it's making sure everybody's clear on what we're trying to accomplish and how we're going to accomplish it. Do not assume.

Q: How can industry leaders foster a culture of continuous improvement when it comes to shutdowns and turnarounds?

A: That is a difficult proposition. Especially in the turnaround world you don't have – in a lot of cases – continuity. And so, for me, it's maintaining the continuity of an organization. Like I said, for over 80% of the turnarounds done now, currently – this year and in '23 and '24 – it's over 80% failure rates. Unfortunately, in the turnaround environment, you're given one failure, and then it's on to the next guy. And so, it's understanding that in this very complex endeavor, there are going to be problems and issues. You're going to fail. No matter how many times you're successful, you will fail eventually. And so, it's understanding what happened, why it happened, and how you fix it, and not necessarily just pulling the trigger on, "Okay, well, we'll get somebody else to do it next time". And I take that relationship both internally with company resources and with my contractors. Not every contractor failure is solely the contractor's fault. In my experience, most of the time it's about 50:50 – it's about half their fault and about half the company side's fault – because something was not communicated well. And for that, I look at it and it comes down to developing a work process and documenting your ways of working. The turnarounds are not new. They have been going on ever since the industrial revolution started. So, this is not a new endeavor and for whatever reason – I don't know why – we are very content to sit on tribal knowledge. And tribal knowledge in today's environment changes dramatically, very quickly. And so, it's documenting work process, documenting your plans, and then retaining and maintaining both your talent and your plans. The number of organizations that I see that bring someone in, they develop a turnaround work process, they go and execute the turnaround and it fails for whatever reason. There is a million reasons it can go wrong, some of them within your control, some of them not. Weather is one of the biggest failure drivers that we have. And I tell them, "I can't tell you how many rain days I'm going to have". It's very difficult. If I'm in West Texas, where I'm from, the probability I'm going to have rain days is pretty low. Now if I'm on the Gulf Coast, well, the probability I'm going to have rain days is very significant. But the weather man can't predict it, so what makes you think I can? It's understanding those impacts, and then it comes down to flexibility and adaptability. It's like I said, all the plans in the world are good till the first shot. And then after that, it's understanding – how do you do that? I would say, for me, conferences and networking are one of the big impacts – if you're new to the business, you're new to the organization, reach out. There are dozens of people like myself that have been through the fires. And unfortunately, the things that go wrong tend to stick in your mind better than the things that go right. But in most cases, we're happy to help. We don't want someone to fail. We don't want you to make the same mistakes I made. Ask questions, engage, go to conferences and learn. I go to the conferences and I still learn. I take what my competitors and what industry is doing and what they present, and I look at it and understand how they're applying this particular fix or process to theirs. And then, it’s asking, “Does that fit mine? And how do I turn the lesson someone else learned into benefit for me?”

POST-TURNAROUND REVIEW & FUTURE PLANNING:

Q: How do you conduct post-turnaround reviews, and what metrics or KPIs do you use to measure success and areas for improvement?

A: Of course we do lessons learned, just like most everybody does. We also do vendor evaluation. Each co-ordinator area – pretty much everyone associated with the turnaround, including my vendors, and my contractors – are all part of the participation on this so we go back and we review each vendor's participation and also the company site. Because – and I talk to people all the time about this – when you bring a contractor in to do a turnaround for a site, a turnaround is a big deal. This is once every two years, three years, five years, seven years – this is an event for the site. For the contractor, this is tomorrow – when he's not doing it for you, he's doing it for somebody else. And so, it's taking those things that they see from all of the different owner companies and different contractors and different things that they've experienced, and integrating those things into your lessons learned. "Hey, this didn't go the way we wanted it to. It was okay, but it wasn't good. What areas do you see for improvement?" And it's leaving that open forum for people to be able to communicate and the way that I have my process set up, it's done anonymously – good, bad or other, I want to know. And then also, part of my evaluation process is that I look for individual performers. A lot of times within an organization or a crew, you have people that step up well above and beyond what is requested of them to drive success. And so, from a contractor standpoint, I want to know that person, because when it comes time to execute that scope of work again, or a similar scope of work, now I have somebody that I know is going to perform and try. And so, we correlate those in the KPIs and the metrics to evaluate vendor performance and not just a single point of contact. For general mechanical, I will have probably 30 or 40 evaluations – from operations, from inspections, from reliability people, from engineers, things like that – giving me different viewpoints of their interaction with that contractor to understand both their performance and where they did very well and where their weak points were. And then I take that information back to my contractors, and I provide feedback to them, and I'm like, "Guys, this is an area that you were weak in, and this is an area you were very strong in", to help them continuously improve. I'm very big on developing my contractors and their capabilities, because – and I tell my contractors this all the time – my job, my role, is to make you successful. If you're successful in executing your scope of work, I'm successful on the turnaround.

Q: Can you share an example of how a recent shutdown or turnaround led to improvements in subsequent projects, either through lessons learned or the implementation of new practices?

A: We had one a few years ago with some debris that was left lying inside a piece of pipe. It was just a general piece of pipe, there was nothing special about it, but it caused major damage post start-up. And so that drove us to look at our closure processes and consider piping as part of it, because when we go close a piece of equipment, or exchangers or whatever it is, whether it be a tower, an exchanger or anything else, we have a very long, detailed checklist of everything we go through to check to make sure. Most of them are based on lessons learned. Whoops, we didn't make sure the drain lines were unplugged, and then we had to shut down to go unplug the drain lines because it wouldn't work. Those are lessons that we learn continuously. We document those lessons onto our information so that we don't make that mistake again. We had that one, I won't call it a one-off – it's happened periodically, multiple times throughout my career and I've seen it in other turnarounds. So, now we took a step back and we made a piping closure form on when we will inspect pipe to ensure there's no debris in it and how we will inspect it. So that was one that definitely drove an improvement and a new practice for us to understand that it doesn't take very much to cause a problem.

Q: What advice would you offer to a new manager in the petrochemical turnaround industry?

A: Don't? No, I'm kidding. I love the turnaround industry. It is by far one of the most fun and challenging environments you can ever get into. The biggest advice I offer to people continuously is: develop a plan. The plan is going to change but develop a plan and stick to your plan as much as you possibly can. And then reach out. There are hundreds of consultants and industry experts and LinkedIn – you can ask a question on LinkedIn, and I promise you, there'll be a dozen people answering. Now, probably 10 of them don't know what they're actually talking about, but you will get a couple that generally are willing to help you. And so, it's learning the flexibility and adaptability, especially on the chemical side. It is a continuously evolving industry, it is continuously changing – the technology changes, the people change, all that. And so, it's learning patience – I would say that’s probably one of the biggest, most difficult things to learn. But it's also learning how to be adaptable and flexible. Not everything is going to go your way. So, how do you adapt and then develop a network of industry professionals that you can reach out to when you come across a problem? I have a big, huge suite of industry experts so when I come across something I've never seen before, I have a network of people that I can reach out to. "Hey. Have you ever seen this before? Have you ever heard of this?" We had a weldability issue on some material on a turnaround recently and I went through probably 20 or 30 of my experts, and finally got to one that said, "Yeah, I just had that problem, like three weeks ago". And I'm like, "Okay, what did you do to fix it?" He said, "I got a new piece of pipe because I couldn't fix it". So, I don't really have the option to get a new piece of pipe so, and he's like, "Well, at least that's only way I got to through it", but we went through what I had tried, what he tried, different things. So, develop that network. And that's where I think the conferences and the industry networking and all that is invaluable for you to develop those relationships. Sit down, ask questions, it's like I said – never make the assumption you're the smartest person in the room, because there are people out there that have been doing it for, many, many years. I myself, I'm almost 40 years in the business now. Have I seen everything? No. The number of times that I say, "I have never seen that before" during every single turnaround just amazes me. I have thought for years that I'm going to get to the point eventually that I have seen most all of it, and every single time I think that I get surprised.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

Q: As the petrochemical industry faces increasing pressure for both operational efficiency and environmental responsibility, what do you think will be the most significant challenge in future shutdowns and turnarounds?

A: People. The capability and the amount of people coming into industry currently is so far below normal levels that it is very, very scary. When I started in this business back in the 1980s, there were hundreds of thousands of craftsmen that you could engage and learn from and in today's world, people that are true craftsmen or very knowledgeable in their craft get promoted so quickly and move up through the ranks so fast that they don't have time to fully develop. And so, I think that's going to be one of our biggest challenges – how do we maintain? How do we develop, maintain and attract talent back to our industry? There are so many industries now that compete. The driving force was wages, you wanted to make money. You were going to have to work for it, but you could make as much as you wanted to make within this industry. And now, there are competing industries that are paying just as well and you don't have to be out in 10-degree weather or pouring down rain and working 14 hours a day for weeks on end. So, it's a very difficult proposition. Retention of development and retention of talent, I think, is going to be the challenge over the next 10 years, because we have a huge swath, myself included, that are going to be dropping out of industry soon. Our time is done. And so how do we transfer our knowledge and skills down to the next generation? And then – and unfortunately I was the same way, I can't say that I wasn't – the older guys would tell me, "Well, this is how I do it". And I look at it, go, "That's not how I'm going to do it". And then I get in there and do it go, "Well, now I know why he said to do it that way". So, there is a lot that you're just going learn the hard way that, yes, we've been there, yes, we've done it. I think, to me, that's the biggest challenge that we see – both on company side and contractor side, it is becoming increasingly difficult. I don't remember the last Gulf Coast numbers, but I think it was around 120,000 to 130,000 craft short for 2025. We already don't have enough people to accomplish all the activities that industry wants. And so how do we get people to get into the business and stay in the business?

Heith Robey will be a speaker at the upcoming Petrochemical & Refining Engineering & Construction Conference - https://www.epcshow.com/petrochem-refining-engineering-construction